If You Want To Write

“The guys that wrote the best songs were the guys that wrote the most songs.” That was said by the daughter of a Tin Pan Alley songwriter. But it’s obvious, isn’t it? If you want to be good at writing, you need to do as much writing as you can. And there’s a corollary to that—you need to read as much as you can too. That’s the way to find out how other people have done it. Read the things you like best to learn how to write things you will like. And train yourself the way an athlete does. I spend time every day practicing being able to sit down, pick up my pencil and go, before the fear and doubt have a chance to make me timid. I also spend time writing without knowing what I’m going to say or where my story is going to go. I find that when I write that way, I stumble upon interesting ideas that I didn’t know I had, directions I couldn’t have planned for. But that’s what I do. What you should do is figure out what it is you want to write, what kind of writing you want to get good at, and then practice that a little every day until you train yourself. That seems much more useful than going to writing workshops where you write something and then have other people tear it apart. Quentin Tarantino said, “I didn’t go to film school. I went to films.”